Curtis Lemay
Posts: 12969
Joined: 9/17/2004 From: Houston, TX Status: offline
|
Attached is a screenshot of the initial situation. I’ve circled where the Allied Theater Recon has revealed artillery in the rear. (Your results will be different). But we can be sure that there is more hidden in other places that won’t be revealed until we attack. The arrows show how Major Escarpments will channel the attacks. Only the Utah Beach forces have a choice where to attack. Note that, in most cases, Allied assault-hex density is red. Also, the Attrition Divider is 4, making losses 2.5 times the rate of scenarios using the default AD setting. And we know there’s lots of German artillery support out there. Some assaults will be across escarpments against fortified defenders. We have to be judicious in the forces we commit to each attack until things improve, especially regarding infantry. But, at the same time, there’s real urgency to get ashore and get inland. Reinforcements are scheduled to arrive only in the beach hexes – currently occupied by the Germans! Because of the increased losses expected, I regard the correct attacking setting to be “Limit Losses”, and that’s what I used when playing the turn. The objective is to only expend one combat-round per attack, to allow the maximum exploitation of attack successes. This could also be achieved via the “Minimize Losses” setting, but that setting has a problem at this attrition level: units can drop out just from defending artillery support and thereby without even assaulting. This seriously weakens attacks, especially against armored defenders, since it means that all defender losses come from attacking artillery support only. With Limit Losses, I find that units tend to hang around to actually assault after suffering the defending artillery support, and tend to only last one round in the assault. So it’s the best of both worlds. “Ignore Losses” tends to risk expending more than one round in some particularly thorny attacks, and should be avoided for attacking (there’s one exception I’ll show near the end). However, it is the preferred loss setting for defense, so if a unit is not attacking, I’ll usually set it to that, in case the turn ends. Before setting up attacks, I recommend making a few changes to the air deployments. To most easily do this, select the first unit you can change from the Air Unit Report, then use the next unit buttons to go to each subsequent one. Every unit is needed, so take all of them you can out of Interdiction mode. P-38s, P-61s, Tempests, & Typhoons should go to Air Superiority. I don’t like to use low-altitude bombers or fighter-bombers to bomb with since they take too heavy losses to AAA. Finally, dig-in all the paratroop units since they can’t move this turn anyway.
Attachment (1)
|